Output details

An incomplete archive of unfinished ideas

Curators Tessa Peters and Janice West invited four artists to consider and respond to the archive of the Crafts Study Centre (UCA Farnham). The works produced were then shown at the Centre in June – October 2011 together with a selection of archive objects, as the exhibition Memoranda. An accompanying publication contains essays by Daniel Miller, Glenn Adamson and the curators, as well as interviews with the participating makers.

Potter’s work is known to make systematic explorations of the way craft objects embody social and emotional relationships. In the Memoranda interview and essay, she discusses the role of the collection as classificatory system; dividing completed objects from the process of their making. Aware of the profound importance of process, Potter selected ceramic test pieces produced by Lucie Rie and Edward Johnston’s instructional calligraphy (‘56 As made as wrongly as possible’) as triggers for her piece: An Incomplete Archive of Unfinished Ideas.

Potter’s response to the archival material highlights ‘elimination’ and ‘incompletion’ as intrinsic to making practice, constituting the work of research itself. Twenty-five containers for rejected experiments were carefully constructed and labelled; inviting viewers to consider craft as a form of memory and notation, rather than purely a skillful route to objects. The context for the work is an intervention into the discourse of contemporary craft culture, which validates the artifact through the critic endowing it with ‘cultural capital’. Potter offers an encounter with the truth of error, and underlines the role of process as a journey towards knowing: the exhibition being the condition for the work’s agency and presence.

Memoranda was reviewed in Crafts (2011), a-n magazine (2011) and Museums Journal (2011). A seminar was also held during the exhibition, where Potter discussed working with the archive and the development of her response.